The United States is in a period with a “persistence of diminished democracy,” according to a report that will be released on Tuesday. It’s the third study released in the last week that concludes that American democracy is eroding under President Trump. Collectively, these studies show definitively that those of us warning of Trump’s authoritarianism aren’t just crazy liberal partisans. Experts armed with data and cross-country comparisons are universally declaring that the United States is becoming less democratic and at a rate much faster than other nations around the world.
The only good news from these studies is that they point to clear steps to fighting authoritarianism that have worked around the world and might here, as well: judicial rulings, mass protests, and eventually, elections.
A group of around 600 American political scientists on average rank the state of U.S. democracy at 57 on a 0-100 scale, according to the just-released report from Bright Line Watch, a research consortium that polls scholars every few months. That is a huge drop from the 67 that experts gave the United States in December 2024, when Joe Biden was still president. “Expert ratings of U.S democracy have largely stabilized at lower levels than any period since our data began in 2017,” Bright Line writes in an understated tone in the report. Ratings hovered between 60 and 70 during Trump’s first term and Biden’s four years.
A cross-national comparison reinforced the report’s alarming message. The experts rated Israel’s democracy at 49 and Mexico’s at 60, somewhat similar to the United States. But other countries have much more robust democracies right now, such as Great Britain (83) and Canada (88), the nations that the United States usually compares itself to.
Bright Line asked the scholars to assess if various events in Trump’s second term constituted a “threat” to democracy. Nearly all of the scholars agreed on a few key developments: Trump directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies; FBI director Kash Patel shutting down his agency’s public corruption unit; Trump pardoning allies involved in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. They listed dozens of other actions, of course, since Trump breaks with democratic norms every day.
Bright Line’s dire but not catastrophic findings mirror those of Freedom House, a D.C.-based group that has assessed the state of democracies in countries throughout the world since 1972.
It scored the U.S at 81 based on the events of 2025 in a report released last week, a dip from 84 in Biden’s last year. But that relatively small year-to-year drop understates a broader story. Since 2005, the United States has dropped 12 points. In comparison, the average dip for a European Union country is just four points. In short, Freedom House scholars had correctly concluded before 2025 that the United States was already in trouble.
Freedom House highlighted “an escalation … in the executive branch’s unilateral authority,” “a multiyear rise in threats and reprisals for political speech,” and a new presidential administration that “disregarded conflicts of interest and weakened both anticorruption safeguards and enforcement practices.” So, “Trump is a corrupt dictatorial madman,” but in polite, scholarly terms.
Freedom House’s 2026 report on the world overall is titled “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy,” and it highlights an understated aspect of Trump’s democracy erosion: his rollback of initiatives that promote democracy abroad. The Freedom House report explains why the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the diminishment of the Agency for Global Media, and other moves are likely to strengthen autocrats around the world.
Even though its report was negative, it was notable that Freedom House did not formally downgrade U.S. democracy. The group ranks countries as free, partly free, or not free. And so far, the U.S. remains in the free category, which includes countries that score 70 or better.
In contrast, V-Dem, a Sweden-based group that has also assessed countries’ levels of democracy for decades, went there in its recent report, delivering a formal downgrade to the United States. V-Dem designates countries as either closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. Electoral democracies have free and fair elections and basic freedoms for all citizens. Liberal democracy, according to V-Dem, goes further and also includes real checks on executive power and a strong rule of law. I suspect most Americans not enthralled with Trump want the U.S. to be a full-fledged liberal democracy. But alas: V-Dem declared for the first time in decades that the United States is no longer a liberal democracy and is instead simply an electoral one.
The V-Dem report was scathing, in my view more forthrightly stating the radicalism of the Trump administration in 2025 (even compared to 2017–2021) than the other two reports. (I suspect experts from outside the United States are willing to be more frank because they are not cowed by Republican claims that academics and other experts are biased against conservatives.) V-Dem argued that U.S. democracy has diminished to levels similar to its state in 1965. I repeat, 1965. Jim Crow was ending then. V-Dem said that according to its rankings, the U.S. dropped from the twentieth-most democratic of the 179 nations it measures to the fifty-first in Trump’s first year. By V-Dem’s formal scores, the U.S. declined from 0.75 under Biden to 0.57 under Trump, a 24 percent decline.
Here’s the most chilling statistic: According to V-Dem’s measures, Trump has plunged the United States in an authoritarian direction at a much faster rate than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did in their respective nations. Those are the quintessential authoritarians of this era. And Trump is outdoing them all.
V-Dem’s list of Trump’s antidemocratic acts is similar to those of Freedom House and Bright Watch. V-Dem was just more willing to draw out the obvious conclusions—that this is the “most dramatic decline in American history” of its democracy, that Trump is executing a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.”
That’s the bad, and really horrendous, news. There is some good news, though. V-Dem says in 70 percent of the cases where a country was becoming more autocratic, that process has been reversed. The recipe for renewing democracy usually involves: other institutions checking the executive, particularly courts; an organized civil society mobilizing people against the regime; and aggressively contesting the autocrat in the first election after he takes power. All of that is happening here. Lower-level federal judges have long been issuing rulings against the administration. The U.S. Supreme Court is finally showing some signs it will no longer be a lapdog for Trump, although it remains very conservative and partisan. I see more hope in the robust grassroots resistance, such as the anti–Immigration and Customs Agency mobilization in Minnesota and the upcoming next round of No Kings protests on March 28. And Democrats seem likely to do very well in this fall’s elections, as they did in November 2025.
Freedom House too emphasized that the U.S still has competitive elections. And Bright Line argues that things are already getting slightly better. While Freedom House and V-Dem assess democracy yearly, Bright Light does surveys a few times a year. In April 2025, when universities and law firms were capitulating to the president every day and Elon Musk was single-handedly dismantling government agencies, the scholars ranked U.S. democracy at a 53. The increase to 57 from Bright Line isn’t because Trump has become less radical. Instead, “experts see improvements in judicial checks on the executive and not using the military for political purposes, which may reflect the Supreme Court tariff decision, and the end of domestic deployments of the National Guard.”
So all is not lost. America can restore its democracy. But we should not downplay what these reports show. Bright Line shows months of democratic decline, V-Dem a year, Freedom House two decades. All are correct. Trump is the immediate cause of this decline, but we had to have voters and a political system that empowered him. Black people, women, and other groups had nowhere near full democratic rights in the United States in 1965. They do now. But Trump has destroyed so many other parts of our democracy that a serious organization can say American democracy is as weak as it was in the civil rights era. It’s ugly, and time is running out. If JD Vance succeeds Trump, we might be headed down one more rung to electoral autocracy.
